KIAF SEOUL 2025

For this year’s Kiaf SEOUL, Kukje Gallery highlights a curated selection of leading international blue-chip artists, centering around Swiss contemporary artist Ugo Rondinone. Widely recognised as one of the leading figures in contemporary art, Rondinone has developed a distinctive practice that spans sculpture, painting, drawing, and site-specific installation. As seen in his iconic works featuring motifs such as the sun, moon, rainbow, trees, and stones, his meticulous observation of nature serves as an integral context throughout his oeuvre.

The booth focuses on two key series by Rondinone. The ‘sun’ is one of the artist’s signature painting series, initiated in the early 1990s. Composed of radiant bands of color arranged in a circular form and blurred with an airbrush, the works create a mesmerising, almost hypnotic optical illusion effect. Drawing inspiration from 19th-century German Romanticism and Tibetan mysticism, the series explores both natural phenomena and the inner psyche, drawing the viewer into a meditative focus beyond the center of the circle. Each painting is titled with its date written in German, capturing both the immediacy of daily life and a sense of cosmic order like a diary entry.

Alongside these works, Rondinone’s new works from the ‘color mountain’ series are also featured in the booth. Stone is a recurring material and symbol in his practice. Stacked vertically after being painted in vivid colors, the works create a synthesis of artificial texture and meditative atmosphere. Through these works, Rondinone evokes a dual perception of nature and artifice, past and present, while reinterpreting the millennia-old tradition of stone stacking across cultures to visually express the continuity and rapport between humans and nature.

In addition, Candida Höfer’s Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin VII 2021 is also showcased at the booth. In 2021, the artist visited the newly-renovated New National Gallery in Berlin, capturing the redesigned spaces on camera and recording the subtle traces of human presence that often go unnoticed. Also on view is Jenny Holzer’s Improving (2024) from her ‘Redaction Painting’ series, which transforms government documents released under the Freedom of Information Act into a monumental abstraction. Anish Kapoor’s Organic Green to Clear (2016) from his iconic series of concave mirrors is also featured at the booth. His works, rendered in a variety of colors, reflect their vicinity while also distorting objects situated afar due to their concave curvature. Kapoor places great emphasis on such two-sided phenomena and the potential chaos they can cause, continuing to experiment with materiality. Daniel Boyd’s painting Untitled (GJOOP) (2024) challenges and interrogates the established narrative on Australia’s colonial history, reclaiming perspectives often overlooked in conventional historical values and critically examining Western historiography. Lastly, the booth features a work from Korakrit Arunanondchai’s ‘history painting’ series, Untitled (2023). Exploring Western-centric globalisation and the history of labor, Arunanondchai incorporates denim into his practice, layering bleached, fire-scorched jeans with images captured during combustion to create a multi-dimensional surface. He is currently presenting a major solo exhibition, The Blood of the Earth, at Le Consortium in Dijon, France.